“Nothing extraordinary happens without a harmonic convergence of a lot of things out there, and usually it’s how you harness those different areas,” LeGarie said of the event, which set a record in attendance of 127,843 this month. “Don’t forget, when summer leagues started, it was mostly seen as a necessary evil, and most players saw it as some kind of a punishment when you played in them. There was some stigma in being a summer league player.”
Warren LeGarie Rumors
Fifteen years ago the summer landscape was splintered, the exhibition calendar was a hodgepodge and the organizations involved were fly-by-night. “I went to every summer league, and people hated them,” said LeGarie, who is also an agent, representing coaches like Rick Carlisle of the Dallas Mavericks and Terry Stotts of the Portland Trail Blazers.
LeGarie started his career representing European players and coaches, bushwhacking across the world. He knew firsthand how badly all the N.B.A. business that went on during the summer needed to be harmonized in a central location. For years he bugged the league office and David Stern, then the N.B.A. commissioner, until he got the go-ahead to organize the Las Vegas league, heavily supported by the current commissioner, Adam Silver.
“I put a proposal on a size 21 shoe,” said Hall, who sent it off to the New York-New York Hotel and Casino. “It said, ‘We’re trying to get our foot in the door.’” Though the two men lost money the first year, by the second they were profitable. LeGarie and Hall are careful not to disparage their competition — the much smaller summer leagues in Orlando, Fla., and Utah — but it is clear they think teams that do not attend Vegas are making a poor decision, and are ceding a competitive advantage. The biggest differences between Las Vegas and Orlando, which hosts eight teams, are that in Orlando there are no fans and news media access is tightly controlled.
The hype surrounding Lonzo Ball and the Lakers-Celtics rivalry has led to Las Vegas Summer League history as Saturday’s session sold out by noon on Friday, according to Warren LeGarie, Las Vegas Summer League executive director. While there have been sellouts on the day of in seasons past, this marks the first time in the 14 years that the NBA summer league has been held at Las Vegas that an entire day session at the Thomas & Mack Center and Cox Pavilion sold out of tickets in advance.
Scott Kushner: Robert Pack is no longer on the #Pelicans staff. He’s trying to land a G-League head coaching job, per his agent Warren LeGarie.
Meanwhile, an ESPN report that former Lakers and Cleveland Cavaliers coach Mike Brown would likely end up on Fizdale’s bench was emphatically refuted by Brown’s agent. “It’s never been true nor was there ever a possibility,” Brown’s agent, Warren LeGarie, said. “Mike was asked and politely declined. We have no idea why one writer from ESPN continues to feed the narrative. I’ve never been called by him to confirm or deny and it’s just pure speculation without any legitimacy. That’s just irresponsible.”
